Mob Protection

Crowdsourcing. Now it’s being used to warn people living in conflict zones about impending violence and other hazards. How so? Check out the piece that aired this morning on public radio about a group of Kenyans who are using citizen reporting to create a new type of digital, early-warning system as a guard against tribal violence.

The group calls itself Ushahidi—which means “testimony” in Swahili. It won a prestigious Knight-Batten Prize last week for the innovative use of interactive media; Ushahidi was created earlier this year amid the savage, inter-tribal violence that followed the Kenyan presidential election last December. A government ban on live media throughout that crisis made Ushahidi one of the only places where citizens could share information about the attacks. Cofounder David Kobaya calls the maps that his site produces "heat maps" —visualizations of places where civic passions overheat. If citizens can "see" where violence is occurring in real time during a news blackout, they can side-step it more effectively, Kobaya says. Further, those sending aid can target it more precisely to the specific areas that need it the most.

Ushahidi asks citizens to call, text, or email site editors with eye-witness reports of violence; the nonprofit then aggregates the reports and makes a map, which is posted and updated in close to real-time. The more people who send in information, the better. "It's the wisdom of crowds principle," Kobaya says. "More information tends to verify itself over time."

It’s one of the latest examples of how people are organizing themselves through the use of social media to help others in their communities. To see the map Ushahidi made to visualize the post-election violence in Kenya, click here.

The group's visualization maps were used again this past summer, in June, to pinpoint the geographic location of xenophobic attacks against non-South Africans. Says Kobaya: “We call this crowdsourcing because it’s crisis reporting that is many-to-many, rather than one-to-many. This puts the control of information into the hands of the many."

For more on the use of crowdsourcing for social change, check out my story this week on msnbc.com, the first article in a four-part series about how cash-challenged nonprofits are starting to use mass collaboration to woo new levels of support and harvest new ideas.

And for more on crowd maps, check out Many Eyes, a public Web site that allows users to visualize complex data, then reap new insights that can be leveraged to help others. It's a project of IBM's Collaborative User Experience Research group, which has helped people make hundreds of conceptual maps, from the dynamic—such as the disposition of U.S. household income (in the billions of dollars, under three click-and-compare scenarios)—to the fun, like this map of the Top 100 Twitterers and their followers. Or, see the one, below, for a social map of someone's Twitter network:

(Illustration at top of page by Robert Neubecker for the ispot.com)